Pints With Aquinas - Remembering the Life & Legacy of Charlie Kirk | Michael Knowles, Isabel Brown | Last Call Ep. 31

Starting point is 00:00:00 What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day? With pray.com, you can begin each morning with powerful daily prayers, inspiring Bible stories, and messages created to strengthen your faith. Whether you need peace, encouragement, or a fresh start, pray.com helps you make prayer part of your everyday life. Download the pray.com app today. It didn't even occur to me that he could be seriously injured, much less be killed. I will never forget what that felt like in that moment. It's still very hard to talk about, obviously. He knew he was tapping into something with this concept of debate

Starting point is 00:00:46 and engaging with people that you may disagree with, that our college campuses in higher education had dramatically failed at. So the guy built a once-in-a-generation movement that completely changed the fabric of American politics. One time, he goes, you know, Michael, you have a beautiful religion. I said, excuse me, where did Charlie Kirk go? Who is this man? What are we doing? And so he died a Protestant. I'm not, you know, I'm not weighing in it anyway. But he took his faith very seriously. It was the most serious thing to him.

Starting point is 00:01:15 It doesn't really shock and surprise me that there has been this much darkness and evil surrounding the response to Charlie's death because of the profound light and goodness we saw in the immediate moments following his death. You stop young people attributing Charlie Kirk to their return to faith or their inception of faith. What a threat to the forces of darkness that do still operate in the world that we live in today. All right. So today we are here to honor the one year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's passing. And so I wanted to bring on Michael and Isabel, who were both friends of Charlie onto the

Starting point is 00:01:55 show. I would like to begin by asking you where you were and what it was like to, uh, to to learn of his death. I was interviewing John Christ in my old studio in Florida and we had just got out when the news broke and there was still some confusion as to whether or not it was lethal because of what we didn't know what had happened exactly. And then we learned that it was. And that was the day I was flying here to Nashville to begin serious conversations with the Daily Wire about working here. And it was really, because I didn't know him. I knew he was an important figure in the conservative movement, but to come here and to see just how depressed

Starting point is 00:02:37 appropriately everybody was because of how much they loved him was really moving. But yeah, where were you, Michael? Well, the circumstances were kind of weird in that I had left the office. I don't always leave the office during the day, but I left to have a lunch with someone who had reached out to me, I didn't know, who was a Catholic. It was about an order of the Catholic Church, and it was just kind of a sort of a sort of a strange afternoon to begin with. I get back to the office, I get into my personal office, and my producer, Ben Davies, comes by and says, hey, have you heard the news Charlie has been shot?

Starting point is 00:03:16 And it tells you how, what a crucial figure he was, you know, seemingly irreplaceable or invincible, because my first reaction was, oh, I hope he's okay. You know, I hope the recovery isn't too bad or whatever, you know. That's, yeah, all right, we'll check in. In other words, it didn't even occur to me that he could be seriously injured, much less be killed. And then I saw the grainy footage. I didn't see the, to this day, I haven't seen the high quality footage.

Starting point is 00:03:52 Thank God. And I saw the grainy footage. I said, oh, my goodness, this is a little more serious. And then we all kind of went into like a war room here and we're just trying to get any information we can get. And then we were getting all sorts of conflicting reports. So he's okay. He has a pulse.

Starting point is 00:04:10 He was. And they, we had an emergency meeting. What do we do? I mean, this was so unthinkable. And he was the kind of crucial figure, not just of debating and fundraising and all these things, but of organizing. He was the coalition maintainer. In some ways more than Trump, you know, I mean, he really, he has.

Starting point is 00:04:32 play the singular role. And so then no one even wanted to bring it up, but someone brought up on the editorial team, can, uh, do we need to start writing an obituary for Charlie Kirk? And I, I said, oh my goodness. And then, and then no one wanted to, to volunteer to do it. And then finally someone brought up and said, you know, Michael, we have this whole team here in Nashville, but you're the only one here right now who is actually friends with him, you know, leaving that open and as if to say, will you write it? And I said, fine. Fine. So I leave the meeting and I go sit in my office and I start writing what I hoped was going to be unnecessary, which was the obituary for Charlie. I sat there for about half an hour an hour and I wrote one sentence. I didn't write a thing really. And then the president of the company, Mike Richards, came in and said he had died and I just hit my desk and just sat there. Thank you. Isabel, what about you?

Starting point is 00:05:29 Yeah, you know, it's crazy to think that it's been a year at this point. It feels like five minutes ago and also a lifetime ago in so many different ways. Shock is an appropriate response like Michael. I experienced as well for those of us that knew Charlie for so long because especially in the last few years with how much Charlie was constantly juggling as the leader of the conservative movement. I don't even think it's arguable, Michael. I think he was the glue that kept everything together far more than even the president of the United States. He was all. always on the run, living out of a suitcase again, kind of like those first early days of turning point before he even had a permanent address. And that meant that you only saw him as his friend every few months to maybe a year at various events or backstage. You might have seen each other at a conference or a fundraiser for four minutes and say, hey, great TikTok you just posted, or I loved that conversation you had on CNN, great speech. I caught you at the RNC, and you would be ships passing in the night. Amazingly, I had just seen Charlie for the first time in nine months, nine, ten months, the week before he had died, as we were the only two speakers

Starting point is 00:06:36 that were contracted to speak at a big pro-life fundraiser at a church outside of Fresno, California. And in a very rare occasion, had gotten to spend about two hours with him backstage, having very fascinating political and theological discussions and catching up on life, facetiming his babies. He was asking me about my new baby. And it was such a refreshing moment in our friendship that I hadn't experienced in a long time because he had been so busy, which made it all that more unbelievable the following week when I had launched my brand new show with Daily Wire at that time on Monday, September 8th. And on Wednesday, we were completely underwater, my team of me and my one producer trying to get our episode out for the day. We had just hit post.

Starting point is 00:07:19 We were kind of relaxing a bit before we started recording that afternoon. And as always, my computer was up in front of me constantly refreshing to see what people response was to our episode as we had just launched the show that week. And I got a phone call from my husband, who most of you probably know works at the White House. And he said, hey, are you on social media right now? To which I said, yeah, of course, I'm on social media. What are you being? And he said, turn off your computer and turn off your phone. I'm going to be home in 25 minutes. And I said, oh my gosh, okay, what's happening? I'm so confused. Did something happen? And he said that Charlie Kirk had been shot on a college campus. Shut down social media. You don't want to see the videos.

Starting point is 00:07:56 he had happened across one of the videos that was pretty high-tech. And thanks be to God, like Michael, I still have not seen any video footage. It's just not how I want to remember my friend. And it's been hard to dodge some of that on the internet this last year. But I shut down my computer. I shut down my phone. I immediately picked up the phone and called my dad because we had been very close with Charlie in some of those early turning point years, driving him to and from airport runs and

Starting point is 00:08:22 college campuses all across the west. And my dad had pulled over his car. he was sobbing his eyes out on the side of the road, and I said, we just don't know anything, we don't know anything, we don't know anything. I worked for Turning Point for about eight years off and on, and so I was frantically calling and texting all of my friends who worked for the organization, and no one really could give us an update. But by the time my husband had got home about 25 minutes later, there was a small gathering of White House staffers who had some capacity of a connection with TPSA gathered in the Situation Room, and they were getting direct updates from the people closest to Charlie

Starting point is 00:08:53 about what was happening. For a brief period of time, it looked like maybe he was going to pull through and he had a stable condition at the hospital. And I was truly on my knees in my kitchen, just praying and praying and praying over and over that the miracle would happen and that Charlie's life would be spared because I couldn't bear the thought of what our world would look like without his voice and the impact he's made on so many young people across our country. The families that exist only because of their shared connection with Charlie Kirk, my family being one of those things. my husband and I met working for Charlie. But unfortunately, about 10 minutes later, we had received the phone call from Charlie's team that

Starting point is 00:09:30 he had passed away. And I will never forget what that felt like in that moment. It's still very hard to talk about, obviously, and just when you think it's going to be easy and that you've kind of moved on from the grief, it just hits you like a tidal wave all over again. But just the feeling of both losing your personal friend and your closest mentor who really you owe your career to in this space. I would have been a doctor if it weren't for Charlie Kirk. Combined with this feeling that you were mourning something so much larger than just a personal relationship, but a cultural icon, someone that impacted everyone's life and truly was a household

Starting point is 00:10:07 name, I don't think our generation has really ever experienced that, and the world probably hasn't since about Princess Diana, is still that balance that I'm trying to figure out now a year later. You know, on the point of the phone calls and seeing him and everything, I can't remember the last time I saw him. He and I were supposed to do it. Well, I saw him virtually because I had just done his show, because he and I were going to do an event together 12 days after he died. And it was in the University of Minnesota. One of the last things he said to me was, I'm Michael, I'm at Palcy and Mogadishu. And this is a very funny line. But one of the last things he said to me privately was, I don't know, two or three days before he was killed, he sent me a text about whatever.

Starting point is 00:10:53 And as both of you know, I don't text anybody, including my friends, including my family, I'm very bad about it. And the morning he was killed, I was driving into work. And I had the thought, I said, shoot, I owe Charlie a text. I got to text Charlie back. I get to that today. And then one of the first thoughts that hit me, when I realized that, like, I didn't process that he was, that being shot meant he could die.

Starting point is 00:11:18 And then one of the first things that hit me was, well, that finally came back to bite me that I don't text anybody back because I was thinking about it that morning. And on the point of like getting shot, meaning you can die, I was talking to my wife, obviously we were texting a lot right after, right as it was happening. And she expressed what I think a lot of us were feeling, which is she saw the video. And she said, watching the video, I knew he was dead. I knew he could not survive that. And I knew that Charlie Kirk can't be dead. I knew he couldn't have been killed. I knew both of those things with certainty in the moment,

Starting point is 00:11:57 which is this very paradoxical reaction that I think a lot of people had. I remember a priest once saying to me, since discernment became fashionable, no one's made a decision since. And if you're a Catholic or just a Christian who's discerning something, hopefully you see why that's funny. We talk about discernment, and discernment's great. You should be doing it, but a discernment is meant to finally make a decision. If you're somebody who is looking to date for the sake of marriage, you want to discern, but you also want to make a decision. And that's one of the reasons that I love

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Starting point is 00:14:47 A short version of it. First time I ever met him, many, many moons ago, I was in the Fox News Green Room in Los Angeles for the morning show, which is on the West Coast. That's 4 o'clock in the morning. Charlie had just come off a plane and we knew each other virtually, but we had never met. This is the first time we met in person, and I'm half asleep in the chair. Charlie comes in bouncing off the walls. Hey, Nolz, this, that, hey, you got to do this. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. He's just such a go-getter. And you're right. We don't want to canonize him in that he was an interesting and good enough person in his humanity that you really want to

Starting point is 00:15:20 get to know that. And Charlie was bright, extremely ambitious, extremely hardworking, but he was basically uneducated because he went right into politics. And one of, he would call me sometime. We'd call each other and try to, you know, game out different debates and things like that together for many, many years. And one of the places that I have a little responsibility in Charlie's career was I had done the Claremont Institute Fellowship, the Lincoln Fellowship, where you do 10 days, you study political philosophy, and it's a crash course. You probably learn more than you would in a graduate degree and undergraduate. And at the time, I was talking with a donor to Claremont. We said, you know, Charlie would be good for this. But what was very

Starting point is 00:16:07 funny is, I don't know that either side, Charlie or the Institute, were all that interested in it. Charlie, because he was doing a billion things and, you know, had the year of the president and all this, and Claremont, because, you know, they really focus on political philosophy and all this stuff. And so we mentioned this to both of them. And I kind of had to convince Charlie. I was like, hey, man, you're like a superstar and you're, you know, you could be president. I mean, But you would really benefit. You, more than basically anyone I know, would really benefit. You don't need to go to a four-year college.

Starting point is 00:16:40 You don't need to go get a PhD. But if you took 10 days out of your schedule, which you don't want to do, and just read these books and talked to these teachers, I think you would really get something out of it. You would really enjoy it. And then eventually they do it. Both groups, I think, both sides benefited immensely from that relationship. And Charlie was so voracious and so curious that he did. delved not only into the reading of this week-long crash course, but then really started to delve much more seriously into political philosophy. And this also bled out into religion. Most of what Charlie

Starting point is 00:17:13 and I would talk about is religion, not politics. And I did see one of the big questions, Isabel, you know this, that people were debating after Charlie died was, was he going to be Catholic or was he going to, you know, was he going to remain? He was an evangelical Protestant and all this. And I despise the people who speak for Charlie after he died, and I just find it so distasteful. But the one thing I think we can say with certainty because it was true while he was alive is he was very curious and he was following ideas to their end. And even the tone, he used to really razz me. He always razz me in public, but even in private he used to razz me a lot on Catholic stuff. And his tone did change by the end of his life. And he was, he was, one time, he said, he goes, you know, Michael, you have a beautiful religion.

Starting point is 00:18:01 I said, excuse me, where did Charlie Kirk go? Who is this man? Why? I didn't, what are we doing? And so he, I, yeah, I, he died a Protestant. I'm not, you know, I'm not weighing in it anyway. But he, it is to say he took ideas very, very seriously. And even more than mere ideas, he took his faith very seriously. It was the most serious thing to him. Isabel. As powerfully said, Michael, and I think you articulate. so well, Charlie was a great thinker, first and foremost. I think as his evolution with Turning Point USA and his adult life evolved, he became a great doer too. But when I first met Charlie,

Starting point is 00:18:37 he was just a once in a generation mind. I went on a whim to one of the very early TPP USA conferences in 2017 when I was a college student to their women's conference that they put on every single year, every June, and knew absolutely nothing about the political world outside of who's running for president, really. I certainly knew nothing about all of the podcasters and the rise of conservative media. I'd seen a few YouTube videos of Ben Shapiro debating on college campuses, and he was speaking at this conference. But I had literally no earthly idea who Charlie Kirk was. And most people at even a TPA USA conference didn't at the time either. He was an early 20-something kid wearing very baggy jeans and white new balanced dad sneakers with an ill-fitting blazer on top and was early into his career as an

Starting point is 00:19:25 organizer, but just had this mind that had you on the edge of your seat every time he took the stage. And in every private conversation that he had, walking around the room with just a few hundred attendees trying to get to know all of the students that had somehow crossed paths with TPSA. And at that time, it was very, very small to the point that Charlie virtually had everyone's cell phone number and wanted to see everyone on their college campuses personally and was checking in with everybody all the time to make sure his little empire he was building was thriving and making a difference on every campus that it had a presence on. He decided to do his first major campus speaking event right around the time that Ben was getting hyper protested at like UC Berkeley in early to

Starting point is 00:20:05 2018 and wanted to do it at my college campus of all places. So I ended up coming to Colorado State University in February of 2018. And it was pandemonium. I mean, truly all hell broke loose. We had to have the Colorado National Guard deployed to our college campus because Antifa, which was a brand new, organized thing in the West, started busing people from all the neighboring states to Colorado to drive cars through crowds of protesters. I mean, we had to have snipers on top of our computer science building. And I will never forget looking at this, he must have been 22 or 23 at the time, year old kid, laughing his head off about all the chaos because it made him so happy to know that the idea of the pursuit of free speech was so controversial in our

Starting point is 00:20:50 culture. He knew he was tapping into something with this concept of debate and engaging with people that you may disagree with that our college campuses in higher education had dramatically failed at. And he wanted to be the absolute best in the business at it. So he read more books than anyone I've ever known. He practiced arguments and did mock debates with his friends more than anyone I've ever seen. And that translated into a passion and a love for what he was doing that led him to also be the boots on the ground and the organizer. The guy built a once in a generation movement that completely changed the fabric of American politics. And what was really special for me, I think, was watching the evolution of that to not just be, hey, it's really important that this

Starting point is 00:21:31 person is running for president. We have to get them back into the Oval Office or we need to get this legislation passed in Congress or let's take back the governor's mansion in this state that we love. But as he got older and his priorities started changing, he got married, he had children and he, I believe, is directly responsible for a whole lot of the rise in traditional values and faith that we're seeing led by young men largely in Generation Z today. Charlie was not officially a saint in this lifetime or certainly hasn't been declared one at least. So I don't want to be hyperbolic when I say this. But I really do believe he has like a CS Lewis level impact on this next generation and completely changed the trajectory of the basic values of an entire group of

Starting point is 00:22:16 young people who now attribute their belief in God and maybe even their salvation, ultimately, to this young man who loved to think and loved to take things to their logical conclusion. He's like Lewis, too, in the sense that on the question of Catholicism, everyone says, had Lewis lived, he certainly would have been Catholic. Had Charlie lived, he certainly would have been Catholic. And you say, well, you just can't know that. I mean, but like, maybe, but you just don't know. I want to ask your response or what our response should be, of Obviously, there have been many false conspiracies pushed by Candace Owens and many other people, but primarily Candace.

Starting point is 00:22:57 It's very sad. What should our response be to these sorts of, I mean, conspiracy theories can be true, but the thing she's saying is clearly false. Several months ago, Matt Walsh, I thought, did an excellent response to Candice because it wasn't tabloids. It wasn't him doing character assassination. He just went through systematically and asked Candace to stop. And I shared this on my wall, Facebook wall on YouTube and everywhere else and just said, this is excellent.

Starting point is 00:23:25 Anyone's still buying into these conspiracy theories that Erica was somehow complicit? Drop it. And of course, I got completely annihilated. But what should our response be to this? Is this the sort of thing that we should just ignore and keep saying what's true about him and just let that die out? Should we take a more combative approach? Does it depend on the person and the commentator?

Starting point is 00:23:45 Well, I had a very unpopular view on this, and I think I've been proven totally right, but it remains an unpopular view. Because I get why, because it's a very visceral feeling sort of thing. So people want a catharsis about it. But my view was that it was a bad idea to constantly talk about the conspiracy theories, to devote whole episodes or weeks or months of podcasts to all that chattering. And I felt it's very important to state the truth. So this is what happened. This is the guy who killed Charlie. This is Charlie's organization is a great organization. Charlie's widow is a wonderful woman. And you know, you have to say the truth for sure. But you can even criticize people for pushing conspiracies, be it Candace or whoever else. But I just felt that the constant chattering about it was a bad idea. And I thought it was a bad idea for two reasons. One, it wasn't going to accomplish anything. It wasn't going to persuade anyone who was going to be persuadable. It wasn't going to result in any concrete political action. And two, a more insidious aspect of it is it played into it. It amplified it. You know, one of the first things you figure out in politics is what does your opponent want? Don't give that

Starting point is 00:24:59 person what he or she wants. And in this case, in the new political media, unlike an old TV network where there are standards and norms and stuff like that, in the new political media, when you're giving air to these things. It's only increasing views. It's only increasing the bottom line. And it's not really achieving any political goals. So my view always, which I think was proven right, certainly by the pretrial hearing, was that the way to deflate some of the conspiracy theories is going to be done when prosecutors present evidence in court, when the defense makes its own arguments. And that's going to be the way to persuade anyone who is persuadable. You know, when nobody listened to my advice and everybody criticized me for giving my advice,

Starting point is 00:25:45 it didn't, you'll notice, it didn't deflate any of the conspiracy theories. And it didn't, the views for the conspiracy theories kept going up and the consternation all kept going up. I think the pretrial hearing started to do that. And not even so much for the prosecutors, but because of the defense. So the prosecutors present their evidence, which was very convincing. But then you'll notice the defense did not advance the conspiracy. theories, indeed, the defense explicitly rejected them. Whoa.

Starting point is 00:26:13 And so that's a definitive political action. And the rest of it, I think, it just becomes noise. That's actually what the defense said. They said, that's noise. We're not focusing on that. That's what we should do. And my argument at the time was, I get it. I understand the moral outrage.

Starting point is 00:26:30 I understand the indignation and the visceral feeling. But sometimes it is better to do the good thing than to feel like you're doing the good thing. The catharsis is very tempting, but I just felt the political effect of it was not going to be good. I want to get your take, Isabel, but I agree, I think for the most part, although I think I would add to that that I think different people have different responsibilities. Different people feel called to do different things. I think there's merit in showing why this narrative that's getting pumped out there day in day out is false. Yeah. Yeah. One of the reasons I love The Daily Wire back in the the day when you all first started was I'm like, oh, thank you. I've been thinking this, but I've been, I was afraid I was crazy. And then to hear you and Matt and Ben say things, I'm like, yes, I feel less

Starting point is 00:27:20 alone right now. That's why I texted you after Ben's nuclear speech. Where was that? At TPSA, right? Right, yeah, yeah. I texted Michael. I probably didn't text this to you because it didn't seem appropriate to send it to a woman, but I'll tell you what I said. It was right after the speech. I texted Michael. I said, can we get Ben a. daily wire branded wheelbarrow to carry his bulls around in because that was something else. Anyway, but enough of that crassness. What's your... Because there are ladies in the room.

Starting point is 00:27:51 I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It's all right. We'll take it. No, Matt, I think that really does hit the nail on the head for what I've been experiencing the last couple of months that people are called to different responses.

Starting point is 00:28:02 And that's true of pretty much any event happening in new media, whether it's political or otherwise. Heck, look at the Catholic world of content creators. Some people are called to apologetics. Some people are called more to the deep theology of things. Some people do long, sit down podcasts. I think God is calling different people to different areas of this continued battle.

Starting point is 00:28:22 But what I've been really trying to reflect on the last year or so has been, okay, how did we get here? Because I think it seems so ridiculously out of left field for so many people, but I don't think it is. And I really think there's two contributing factors to what's been going on this last year. The first

Starting point is 00:28:37 being people's brains truly shattered in the era of COVID-19 related to the world of conspiracy theories. And I don't fault people for that, per se. All of a sudden, these massive conspiracies that people had been peddling from behind the scenes for a while, like a lab leak theory or that a foreign government who hates us released a virus onto our culture to try to kill as many people as possible, or even that the big tech companies were intentionally manipulating their algorithms to suppress conservative thought for half the country, these things turned out to be true. And there was evidence behind all of these things. So I think it created a self-affirming bias for many, many people that virtually everything is a conspiracy theory. And as a result, every conspiracy theory ends up being true when that's

Starting point is 00:29:24 just not reality. Not every conspiracy is true, obviously. But people have started to get into this hamster wheel feedback loop where they can't seem to escape that. And that really breaks my heart for the lack of critical thinking in our world because of bad evil actors that made those conspiracy theories true to begin with. But I also think secondarily, it doesn't really shock and surprise me that there has been this much darkness and evil surrounding the response to Charlie's death because of the profound light and goodness we saw in the immediate moments following his death. I mean, you saw prayer vigils take place all over the world by the millions of people, several million people marched through the streets of London, praying for Charlie Kirk. Every college campus in America

Starting point is 00:30:06 had a massive, massive vigil where you saw huge mass baptisms and record Bible sales and record church pew occupation in parishes across the world, not just the country with young people attributing Charlie Kirk to their return to faith or their inception of faith. So of course, in the realm of spiritual warfare that is constantly waging on behind the scenes that we don't often see, but we know is happening 24-7-365, there would be a counter-reaction to that, because what a threat to the forces of darkness that do still operate in the world that we live in today. I'm surprised by the source of some of that spiritual warfare, certainly I think most people are who have been in the conservative movement for a long time. But what all of us are called to, regardless of if your

Starting point is 00:30:51 personal obligation is to go out and fight against the conspiracy theories, to just tell the truth and go more on offense instead of defense. Every one of us has an obligation to start and end each day related to all of this in prayer because it is never our last line of defense. It should always be our first line of offense. And this speaks volumes to be much more about spiritual warfare than political consternation or debate. A lot of us have a misconception about freedom. What is freedom?

Starting point is 00:31:20 Well, when we talk about freedom, we can talk about being free from something, such as constraints. and this is usually what people mean today when they talk about freedom. But we also need to be talking about freedom for something. Right. So the truest freedom is to be free to be who we are and not enslaved to our passions and our sins. This is why I really appreciate Exodus 90. It's an invitation to step away from the distractions and habits that keep us spiritually numb and create space for prayer, fraternity and a deeper encounter with the father's love.

Starting point is 00:31:53 The goal isn't hardship for its own sake. The goal is freedom in Christ. Join Father Colomber Jordan, CFR and the Exodus 90 Brotherhood for the St. Michael's Lent Challenge, happening now through September 29th. Invite a few men in your life to begin the journey together. St. Michael's Lent with Father Columba Jordan is happening now. Download the Exodus 90 app to start your 14-day free trial or visit Exodus 90.com slash Matt to learn more. That's Exodus 90.com slash Matt, become the man you were created to be. So, thought experiment. If Dr. Scott Hahn invited you over every Tuesday night to teach you scripture, what would you say? You'd probably like clear your calendar. Well, the good news is that's basically what this is. It's pretty wild. I know we take it for

Starting point is 00:32:41 granted because we have everything at our fingertips today. But the access that you and I, Christians living in this day and age, have to some of the world's greatest. Bible scholars is amazing. We just have to choose to do it. With your St. Paul Center membership, you'll have access to world-class scripture and theology courses designed to help you encounter Christ more deeply and share your faith with confidence. No Christ, share Christ. Start your 30-day free trial today at St. Paul's Center.com slash pints or become an annual member, and they will send you a free copy of the complete Ignatius Catholic Study Bible. These guys, are not just really, really knowledgeable, but they're also very excellent teachers. I've actually

Starting point is 00:33:27 used these courses myself and definitely attest to them. Go check them out. Well, final question, because we need to wrap up, what is Charlie's legacy and is there hope for the future of TPUSA or some similar movement? I'll tell you his immediate legacy, totally relating to Isabel's point. I go to a very trad parish, traditional Latin mass, suits and ties, maybe a few fedore. is, you know, it's a little, we're a little odd in the trad world. And what's very nice about that is you can tell when someone new is stopping by because they don't look quite as strange as the rest of us do. And the weekend, you know, the Sunday after Charlie was killed, I saw a number of sweatpants in the parish, T-shirts and sweatpants. I've never been happier to see T-shirts

Starting point is 00:34:15 and sweatpants on adults because it meant that these were people who didn't know anything about the church, hadn't been to the church in a long time, and they just wanted to go to church. And that, you did see that happen. That was an immediate spike. But not to be too rosy about it. I'm a conservative, so I have to be kind of doer sometimes. A lot of people said when he was killed, well, look, he's this great guy and there's this, you know, immediate resurgence of faith. And, you know, you struck him down, but we're going to come back ten times stronger. That isn't true. Assassinations work. That's why people keep doing them. And so the division, we were talking about the conspiracy theories, but just the other sort of division, all this sort of stuff.

Starting point is 00:34:56 I knew that was going to happen right from the start. And anybody who didn't see it coming was deluding himself. That's why the left was so gung-ho. I mean, they've tried to kill a number of people in the conservative movement at the college campuses over the years. You know, they happened to succeed this time with Charlie. So that creates a major, major setback and a real challenge for us. Charlie's political legacy. His ultimate, I think the legacy he wanted was a legacy of faith.

Starting point is 00:35:26 And I think he's got it. I think that happened. His political legacy, he was a great debater. He was a great fundraiser. He was all these things. And he became much better at it over time. His actual singular skill was maintaining a coalition. His skill was political prudence.

Starting point is 00:35:45 His skill was not totally pure ideology all the time. wasn't being ossified, set in stone. It was political prudence, managing a coalition, applying eternal principles to constantly changing circumstances, keeping a group of people, many of whom hated each other, in line together, pointed in the right direction for a common goal, excluding the really toxic elements, but that was it.

Starting point is 00:36:06 He was the coalition guy, and his absences deeply, deeply felt. And I think one way to pay a little homage to his legacy would be for everybody, including, you saw this a little bit right when he was killed, But that fizzled, for the people who really do want to do some good in American politics, who share broadly the same first principles and the same kind of loves and affections, to give each other a little bit of grace, to try to follow his example, which was an excellent example, and to try to maintain, rebuild, and grow the coalition that he was after.

Starting point is 00:36:43 Because I said right after he died in a eulogy or obituary I wrote for him, I said he would have been president. He was running for presidents since he was 12. He was very good at it. A lot of people are running for president since they're 12. He had a plausible path. You know, I mean, he was just so, so impressive. And, you know, there's a lot to learn from that.

Starting point is 00:37:07 He had political goals. He had personal ambitions. But it was so much bigger than all of that. You know, he had a real cosmic and religious. religious Christian view of the world and what politics is for and what the individual is for and what role we all play in the stories. We don't know our roles in our own story because we're not the author chiefly of our own story. God is. When Charlie was removed from the stage, when he was removed in media race, we were all so shocked. But the one thing we can conclude is we all have a role in this story and let us follow his example of how to find and navigate our place in it. Thank you. Isabel, final thoughts. Powerfully said, Michael, obviously I think the biggest impact of Charlie's legacy will forever be the faith that he inspired this generation to embrace and to fearlessly proclaim to the world. It is hard to be so vocally open and honest about your faith in Christ today, but you're watching an entire generation do it in real time. I think that's obvious to everyone in this last year. Politically, I'd also echo, Michael, that beyond just building a coalition, I think Charlie inspired a courage to actually be conservative, on offense for existing people in the echelon of politics, but also for this next generation of ideas and leadership we're going to see grow up and run for office and take over the next

Starting point is 00:38:26 generation of American politics, not to be wishy-washy and sort of the old GOP Republican thing, but to be unabashedly, unapologetically conservative and to fight for the values that our country was built upon and what we know to be eternal principles of what's good and true and beautiful. But I think personally, beyond faith, my favorite component of Charlie's legacy will be what he personally did to revive the American family. He said in an interview just before he died that one of his biggest goals, if he ever were to be president of the United States, and then Erica ended up echoing this in her eulogy that she delivered just a few days after he was killed, his biggest goal as president of the United States would have been to revive the American family. And I really arguably think he already did that in many ways. There are thousands of families that only exist today because kids happened to meet at a TPP USA conference or getting involved on their college campus in some small capacity. I personally know dozens of people who I used to work with at TPA USA who are now married with babies on the way or already have babies.

Starting point is 00:39:29 And I think that alone as a legacy has now inspired so many people who have been strategically programmed to think marriage, kids, I have to avoid that at all costs to see how beautiful it is. and think for themselves, that is stunning, that is timeless, that is eternal. I want to pursue that purpose in my life too. Isabel, Michael, thank you. I thought we could just say a quick prayer for the repose of Charlie's soul. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Eternal rest, grant unto Him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace through Christ our Lord.

Starting point is 00:40:08 Amen. Amen. Thanks, guys. Thank you. What if a few minutes with God could change the direction of your entire day? With pray.com, you can begin each morning with powerful daily prayers, inspiring Bible stories, and messages created to strengthen your faith. Whether you need peace, encouragement, or a fresh start, pray.com helps you make prayer part of your every. everyday life. Download the pray.com app today.

Pints With Aquinas - Remembering the Life & Legacy of Charlie Kirk | Michael Knowles, Isabel Brown | Last Call Ep. 31

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